The place currently occupied by Detroit as the archetypical American ruin and urban failure was held in the 70's by the South Bronx. A mixture of many factors (poverty, discrimination, public abandonment, crime, poor urban planning, arson, greedy landlords, welfare concentration, failed housing projects, Robert Moses' highways, more arson) converted the once thriving neighborhood in a huge vacant lot full of rubish, waste, debris and the ruins of entire city blocks destroyed by fire. The Bronx was burning, and nobody did anything to stop it. "People got used to sleeping with their shoes on, so that they could escape if the building began to burn", writes Robert Worth in an article about "Guess who saved the South Bronx?".
It famously and infamously got turned into the example of urban decay in America, portrayed in movies and books and newspapers and in the collective mind. All around the world, the word "Bronx" still means "scary urban destruction", despite the renewal of the area. The stigma of the burning years will not be easily taken off the borough's name.
Like a sinister opening to the firing destructive decade to come, a study of three streets in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, published in 1969 in The New York Times, found that residents had only a one in 20 chance of dying of natural causes- most were murdered or died of drug overdoses (source: www.livingcities.org).
When President Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx in 1977, strolling in despair through the destruction and ruins of Charlotte Street, the Times said that a visit to South Bronx was as "crucial to an understanding of American urban lie as a visit to Auschwitz is crucial to an understanding of Nazism".
Carter himself coined a famous definition: "The worst slum in America", only two years after the City of New York declared bankruptcy and the Daily News invented his classic headline of October 30 1975, "Ford to City: Drop Dead". New York was being abandoned by a nation living in the suburbs and governed by suburban minds. As Carter asked and answered himself during his tour through the urban battlefield, most of the destruction of South Bronx happened after Nixon cut off the urban renewal funds, in the harsh years of 72-77.
Photos of those blight times show a dead landscape similar to Berlin in 1945. In the wake of his visit in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared the ruins of the South Bronx to London in the Blitz. Awkwardly enough, the Bronx was the broadcasted, official slum of America for who knows what purpose; the fail of the dream and the place presidents chose to be seen, only to do nothing to fix it.
All this I found by browsing South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, a book that tells the tale of a miracle. Charlotte Street went from the dead blight Blitz of a burned wasteland to the pretty tree-lined streets with ranch-like houses and life called "Charlotte Gardens". When in December 1997 Bill Clinton visited the South Bronx, there were no more comparisons with bombed Berlin or London but the story of a salvation taken by the citizens, the community, the city (even though the area is still poor, and crossed with Moses-highways, and industrial depots and bad air).
The case of the Bronx is part of a certain developing of urban centers in America after decades of decay. But we are far from a renaissance, like many say. The "socioeconomic destruction of low-income communities of color" might not happen anymore, but the results of the past are still here and there, ruins run in the cities. In New York, it is not anymore the Bronx, but it is still some areas of Harlem, and many in Brooklyn. Going east, in East New York and the Rockaways, the empty lots and urban falling are visible. The fascination for the American ruins mixes up with the thought of renewal and end of social inequity on a visit to these forgotten spots of decay.
Even in those cities where the physical ruins are low or non-existant, a different kind of disintegration ambushes- the racial and social segregation. Cities like Minneapolis, Denver or Dallas appear generally as examples of healthy and safe American living. But only for whites. An invisible net of low-paying jobs, lack of affordable housing and poverty affects the urban black and Latino population, while the economic rise of America focuses in those whites that never had problems to buy a house and a garage to shelter two cars + the SUV + the snowmobile. In New York City, the intense urban renewal has brought along a deepening income gap- the population growth in the 1990's was at the top and bottom of the income scale (source: www.livingcities.org)
A new kind of racism, more subtle and understated, that seems not to be contested. For many people, it probably is just "how things are", poor and rich.
The ruin is in the mind and the pocket, and that will be far more difficult to cure than a burned lot in South Bronx.
